19. NIEPODLEGLOSC: Twenty Years of Independence (1918-1939)
Molotov called it 'the monstrous bastard of the Peace of Versailles'. Stalin called
it 'pardon the expression,'a state'. J. M. Keynes, the theorist of modern capital-
ism, called it 'an economic impossibility whose only industry is Jew-baiting'.
Lewis Namier called it 'pathological'. E. H. Carr called it 'a farce'. David Lloyd
George talked of 'a historic failure', which had 'won her freedom not by her
own exertions but by the blood of others', and of a country which 'imposed on
other nations the very tyranny' which it had endured itself for years. 'Poland',
he said, 'was drunk with the new wine of liberty supplied to her by the Allies',
and 'fancied herself as the resistless mistress of Central Europe'. In 1919, Lloyd
George was reported as saying that he would no more give Upper Silesia to
Poland 'than he would give a clock to a monkey'. In 1939, he announced that
Poland had 'deserved its fate'. Adolf Hitler called it 'a state which arose from
the blood of countless German regiments', 'a state built on force and governed
by the truncheons of the police and the military', 'a ridiculous state where...
sadistic beasts give vent to their perverse instincts', 'an artificially begotten
state', 'the pet lap-dog of Western democracies which cannot be considered a
cultured nation at all', 'a so-called state lacking every national, historical, cul-
tural and moral foundation'. The coincidence of these sentiments, and of their
phraseology, is unmistakable. Rarely, if ever, has a newly independent country
been subjected to such eloquent and gratuitous abuse. Rarely, if ever, have
British liberals been so careless of their opinions or their company.^1
The Polish Republic came into being in November 1918 by a process which
theologians might call parthenogenesis. It created itself in the void left by the
collapse of three partitioning powers. Despite Molotov's assertion, it was not
created by the Peace of Versailles, which merely confirmed what already existed
and whose territorial provisions were limited to defining the frontier with
Germany alone. It was not the client state which the Allied governments had
been preparing to construct in 1917-18 in collaboration with Dmowski's
National Committee in Paris. It was not the state which the Bolsheviks hoped to
construct as their Red Bridge with revolutionary Germany. And it was not the
puppet Poland which Russia, Germany, and Austria had variously proposed in
the course of the Great War. It owed its procreation to no one, not even to the
Poles themselves, who, fighting with distinction in all the combatant armies, had
been constrained to neutralize each other as a political force.^2